BY ANY MEASURE, Karl McKay Wiegand (1873-1942) led an
extraordinary life, He had multiple careers as a
gangster, bootlegger, mountain climber, Abstract Expressionist, naval
commander, chancellor, and matinee idol. At times he took on several of these
roles at once. Dutch artist Marcel van Eeden recounts Wiegand’s exploits in a
suite of 150 pencil drawings done in the style of old news photos and snapshots
and simply titled K.M. Wiegand. Life and
Work, 2005-2006. Here we see him scaling a rock face, getting handcuffed,
being sworn into office, or standing glamorously with a starlet in the glare of
the paparazzi’s flash. Here are the covers of the books he wrote and the
scrawled drawings he did as a child. But then Van Eeden knows Wiegand’s
remarkable story better than anyone else—since he made most of it up.
There actually was a K. M. Wiegand—a botanist who enjoyed a
long, successful, and apparently placid life as a scholar at Cornell
University, Yet what Van Eeden gives us is “Wiegand,” a flight of biographical
fantasy so lush, so giddily extensive that it seems to encompass whole swaths
of twentieth-century ambition while playing like a cartoon opera inspired by
spy novels, Hollywood gossip, society memoirs, and macho elaboration. Many of
the drawings are captioned, the texts frequently broken off midsentence to
suggest that these fiercely imagined scenes, like a fever dream, are just
fragments of Wiegand’s deliriously manifold saga. Time itself has multiple
identities in these pictures.
When the suite was shown at the Berlin Biennial last
winter, it had a particular poignancy in the context of the exhibition. With
its use of various buildings up and down the venerable Augustrasse, heavy with
the history of its Jewish girls’ school and its deportation point for the
concentration camps, the biennial took the sovereignty of memory and of place
as a given. But that’s not to say that it did so without a knowing playfulness
and curiosity-just what one expects from the curatorial team of Maurizio
Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick. Of course, the complicated
theme of memory in contemporary culture resonates far beyond Augustrasse, and
so Van Eeden’s amusingly subversive work, like a fun house of memory, seemed to
echo sentiments captured in a phrase written by another Cornell professor whom
Wiegand might have come to known had he lived six years longer; that lover of
paradox Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, “I do not believe in time.”
It would seem that Van Eeden doesn’t believe in time
either. But this is only to say that he, like Nabokov, is evidently so
fascinated by the kaleidoscopic eventfulness of life and how each of us is
changed over its course that he exaggerates time’s brilliant surface, which
shines like the mirrored convexity of a bubble, so that all the images that
pass over it are at once super-real, suspect, and achingly fragile. In all his
outlandishly multifarious identity, Wiegand is an extravagant elegy for the
demise of the authentic self, but an elegy under the profound pressure, as I’ve
said, of what memory is in contemporary life. And Van Eeden was not alone in
In a nondescript apartment used by the biennial as an
exhibition space, Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Album,
2005, sat on an otherwise bare table. At first glance the book seems humble
enough—203 snapshots, eighty-eight in color, the rest in black and white,
unremarkable except for the fact that she has digitally removed herself from
every one of them, so that the viewer experiences a philosophical double take
as the off-hand images of family and friends yield up little visual gaps and
leave a larger existential one. Among the photos was an image of a small child
in a belted sateen suit and a matching wide-brimmed hat the color of peach
sherbet, leaning ever so slightly to his right in front of a festooned
Christmas tree, Grzeszykowska must have been there, leaning toward him. In
another photo, in the top row of a group of Catholic girls, far to the right, a
space is opened up just between the last two celebrants: She must have been
there, too. In the backseat of a car, we view the cropped shoulders and arms of
two figures, while the camera lens stares straight between them at what is now
only a gap. And here is a vacant schoolyard, patches of snow on the ground, a
stone path, a tree, a white bench in the background, the camera trained on the
center of the image, where no one stands.
I’m reminded of the scene that opens Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in
which the Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald is lent a fur hat by a man
simply called Clementis, who stands next to him on a balcony as they’re
photographed in a flurry of snow. When Clementis is hanged years later for
treason, the photo- graph is retouched. The place where he stood is empty, and
all that’s left of him is his hat, still propped on Gottwald’s head. Yet
Grzeszykowska’s alterations provoke a reading that stretches beyond the
political, and at the base of this reading is the question of remembrance: how
we remember ourselves and how we are remembered by others.
Memory isn’t solely a neurological activity through which
we each recognize the self as a coherent unit, as an anchor to our identities.
Memory is also a cultural repository, a storage house of filtered facts that we
call history, which serves up precedents and homilies from the past to show the
citizens of the present how they should behave, how to legitimate the ruling
power or goad it. And of course in the late twentieth century, memory became a
term that is synonymous with data storage and computers. We’re all tethered to
hard drives and databases, and to the task of endlessly searching like digital
miners through the rubble of experience and knowledge, The way that Google has
entered our lives indicates how profoundly reliant we are on an infinitely deep
and infinitely accessible global memory, not solely on our personal ones.
Still, the fusion of personal, cultural, and technological
memory in contemporary life has only made recollection more complex as a
subject and as an activity-, and the fallibility of memory, along with its
capriciousness, are the crux of Van Eeden’s and Grzeszykowska’s projects in
Berlin. Even when it is healthy, the mind manipulates and distorts memories as
replicas of original events. Yet there is a con- sequence of neural damage, a
syndrome called confabulation, that’s ripe for a larger symbolic role.
Confabulations are verbal or visual accounts of events in which personal
experiences can be entwined with things unrelated to one’s own experience—a
news broadcast, a story snatched from a novel, a conversation overheard. The
con- fabulist doesn’t know what is and isn’t true in the telling of his own
story. These are, in digital terms, glitches, data corruptions, while in
neurological terms the confabulist suffers anosognosia: an inability to recognize
the presence of the disease.
To be inside Van Eeden’s K.M. Wiegand, to imagine being Wiegand, is to be a confabulist. To
be inside Grzeszykowska’s Album is to
be a confabulist turned inside out, turning yourself into nothing everywhere
you’ve been. In either case, to be outside of the work-, to be its maker, is to
be an ironist, a commentator on cultural confabulation in an age in which the
ceaseless data flow of events, anecdotal trifles, spectacular images, and
profligate fictions is so present and quick that our “I” is untethered from
gravity, lightened, our identities easily unmoored. Irony here is a schism; the
multiplication or subtraction of the self induces a rupture between the visual
facts before our eyes and the knowledge that these aren’t facts at all but
fantasy, manipulation, and (self-)deception. The
works’ suggestion of confabulation as a cultural phenomenon has a mordant
sting, the sharp rap of truth as if mind and memory on a global scale have now
fallen into dysfunction.
Van Eeden’s Wiegand, for all his impossibly accomplished
parts, is really so profuse a personality that he, too, becomes nothing at all.
Finally he’s like Grzeszykowska’s disappeared self: a vaporous assemblage of
fragile, infinitely mutable bits of data. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
On tile one hand, the accumulation of personal and cultural memories now
compiled second by second seems like bottomless richness. On the other hand,
we’re distorted, fractured, or we simply disappear in the weightless scatter of
information strewn across databases that serve as the archives of human memory.
Maybe that seems too grand, too portentous, and yet this is
what Van Eeden and Grzeszykowska offer: droll spectacles of the self imagining
the most remarkable things without having lived them, becoming lost in them, or
vanishing entirely into the ceaseless accumulation of facts, images, and
phantasms. The extrapolation from the confabulist effect is obvious: We are
creating a social contract that no longer honors the property of selfhood. We
“remember” whatever we want to be. We make avatars, we’re little girls in chat
rooms, we live in the digital confabulation of the virtual online world Second
Life, or we’re Jayson Blair, the disgraced New
York Times reporter who plagiarized and invented thirty-six of the
seventy-three stories he wrote for the paper from 1998 to 2003, projecting
himself into the landscapes of places he did not visit, into the homes of
people he did not meet but quoted readily, creating new contexts for lifted
facts.
Of course, there’s another way to look at this work, and
that’s as a celebration of identity’s promiscuity. To be weightless is to be
free. To invent oneself over and over in an orgy of Walter Mitty-ish escape
from the real (or simply, like Harry Potter, to put on an invisibility cloak
and disappear) is to evade the gaze of the patriarchy, historicity, or the
lashes of self-consciousness. Memory is the map of the self, and hou each of us
reads the map indicates the way we render what we were in the making of what we
decide to be.
Whether it’s a Freudian reading of inconstant dreams that
are a puzzle of the past or a cellular reading of the patch), histories written
in our genes, memory’s very identity as a storehouse built on unreliable
footings opens all the possibilities of invention and corruption, on both a
personal and a social scale. These inferences hover above the cleverly
destabilized portrait of Wiegand as a confabulation of the contemporary soul as
much as they rumble beneath Grzeszykowska’s un-portrait, her etiolated identity
torn from her own history, self-deleted. Technology is making our private
memories and the memories in the global mind seem more and more the substance
of unlimited plasticity and recombinant potential. The moral compass
spins.
STEVEN HENRY
MADOFF RULES.